The GridLab Portal
Portals & Portlets 2003
Jason Novotny novotny@aei.mpg.de
Michael Russell russell@aei.mpg.de
Oliver Wehrens wehrens@aei.mpg.de
Albert Einstein Institute
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003
The State of Grid Computing
Access to Grid services and resources still difficult for end
users
Current API’s and tools are still very primitive
Grid middleware and tools are constantly evolving making
it difficult to provide reliable, robust infrastructure
Ultimately end users want to be hidden from technical or
implementation specific details of Grids
Growing infrastructure complexity means diminished
usability
Many projects focusing on a narrow range of services for
a very specific set of users
There is a real need for higher level tools and grid
computing environments
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003
GridLab Project
Funded by the EU (5+ M€), January 2002 – December 2004
Application and Testbed oriented
Cactus Code, Triana Workflow, all the other applications that want to be Gridenabled
Main goal: to develop a Grid Application Toolkit (GAT) and set of grid
services and tools...:
resource management (GRMS),
data management,
monitoring,
adaptive components,
mobile user support,
security services,
portals,
... and test them on a real testbed with real applications
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003
GridLab VO
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PSNC (Poznan) - coordination
AEI (Potsdam)
ZIB (Berlin)
Univ. of Lecce
Cardiff University
Vrije Univ. (Amsterdam)
SZTAKI (Budapest)
Masaryk Univ. (Brno)
NTUA (Athens)
Sun Microsystems
Compaq (HP)
ANL (Chicago, I. Foster)
ISI (LA, C.Kesselman)
UoWisconsin (M. Livny)
collaborating with:
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003
Users!
EU Astrophysics Network,
DFN TiKSL/GriKSL
NSF ASC Project
other Grid projects
Globus, Condor,
GrADS,
PROGRESS,
GriPhyn/iVDGL,
CrossGrid and all the
other European Grid
Projects (GRIDSTART)
other...
GridLab Services
Resource Management Services
Resource Brokering
Job Submission
Usage Policy Management
Data Management Services
Data Replication
Date Movement
Visualization Services
Monitoring and Adaptive Services
Application Performance Monitoring
Resource Utilization
The ability to alter applications at runtime
Information Services
Resources, user profiles, applications…
Testbed Management Services
Grid-wide administration, testing and QA services.
Notification Services… and many more!
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003
GridLab Portal
The GridLab Portal plays
a critical role within the
GridLab architecture as
the front-end to the
resources and services
GridLab provides.
It must provide a wellintegrated, cohesive
environment for
accessing GridLab
resources and services.
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003
Gateway to GridLab
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003
Frameworks
The first step in building a Grid portal is to decide whether
to adopt or develop a framework to support Web interface
development.
The key features that a Grid portal framework should
provide are:
Single sign-on to all elements of portal
Support for authorizing access to all elements of portal
The ability to administer the portal at runtime
Built-in support for persistence management
Caching and connection pooling
Model-View-Controller pattern
Support for multiple devices (PCs, mobile phones, PDAs)
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003
MVC Pattern
Support for the MVC Pattern is just one of the many
aspects that are important to a solid Grid portal
framework.
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003
Early Portal Projects
Grid-Port:
Perl-based framework developed by Mary Thomas and Steve
Mock at San-Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC)
Grid Portal Development Toolkit (GPDK):
Developed by Jason Novotny at Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratories (LBNL)
Astrophysics Simulation Collaboratory (ASC):
Developed by Michael Russell at University of Chicago, now lead
by Greg Daues of National Super-Computing Alliance (NCSA)
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003
Portlets
The Portlet Java Specification Request (JSR-168)
lays the foundation for a new open-standard for
Web portal development frameworks.
Portlets define an API for building atomic,
composable visual interfaces to Web content or
service providers
A portlet provides a “mini-window” within a portal
page. Multiple portlets can be composed in a
portal page.
Portlets extend servlets. The idea being to reuse
common method signatures.
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003
Layout & Presentation
Portlets define how to
construct and deliver Web
content as modular
components within a Web
page.
Portlets can be
“maximized” or
“minimized” within a Web
page.
Users can choose to
which portlets they want
to be “subscribed”.
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003
Portlet Implementations
Jakarta Jetspeed
jPortal
IBM WebSphere
Oracle i9AS Portal
GridSphere…
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003
GridSphere Project
GridSphere is already in
beta mode….
We are using it to support
the development of the
GridLab Portal and
several other portal
projects.
Visit our website is at
http://www.gridsphere.org
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003
GridSphere Feature List
Portlet API implementation nearly fully compatible with IBM's
WebSphere 4.2.
Support for the easy development and integration of "third-party
portlets"
Higher-level model for building complex portlets using visual
beans and the GridSphere User Interface (UI) tag library.
Flexible XML based portal presentation description can be
easily modified to create customized portal layouts.
Built-in support for Role Based Access Control (RBAC)
separating users into guests, users, admins and super users.
Sophisticated portlet service model that allows for creation of
"user services", where service methods can be limited
according to user rights.
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003
GridSphere Feature List (cont.)
Persistence of data provided using Castor JDO for RDMS
database support
Integrated Junit/Cactus unit tests for complete server side
testing of portlet services including the generation of test
reports.
Documentation uses DocBook for HTML & PDF output of
guides and tutorials
GridSphere core portlets offer base functionality including login,
logout, user and access control management.
Localization support in the Portlet API implementation and
GridSphere core portlets support English, German, Czech,
Polish, Hungarian and Greek.
Open-source and 100% free! :-)
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003
But wait, there’s more…
Our goal is to develop a general web portal
framework that can be used to host information
oriented web sites, like www.gridlab.org.
We’re developing more advanced content
management tools (in the “conman” webapp) to
support online and offline content management.
In essense, going the opposite route the CHEF Portal
folks went… from Grid to Web and back again.
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003
GridLab Portal Revisited
In the GridSphere model, the GridLab Portal is a
portlet web application managed with the GridSphere
framework.
The GridLab Portal is a collection of portlets for using
the services developed by the GridLab Project.
Ideally, if the Portlet API were available and a
standard deployment model existed, the GridLab
Portal web application would be reusable in other
portlet frameworks, like JetSpeed.
The GridLab Portal is currently in alpha development
but will be online soon!
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003
GridLab Portal Status
The following portlets have been prototyped:
Credential retrieval and administration
Using latest MyProxy client
Job submission
GridLab Resource Management System
Globus Gatekeeper
Condor Job Manager (over GSI-SSH)
(GridLab) Monitoring
Generic interface to monitoring service
Outside developers are getting involved:
Martin Kuba from WP5
Jean-Claude and others from NRC
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003
Future Development
GAT integration
We’re already buidling portlet service factories that hide the underlying
details of working with remote services. Within the GridLab Project,
we’re developing the Grid Application Toolkit as Grid access layer.
OGSA integration
Make it easier to use OGSA services within portal.
Make it easy to publish portlet services as OGSA, thereby turning
GridSphere into an OGSA development environment.
IDE
We are already building higher-level tools to support portlet
development. We would like, one day, to explore the idea of building a
visual integrated development environment (IDE).
Flash presentation
By adhering to the MVC model and using JSP strictly for rendering (i.e.
keeping all programming logic inside Java, not JSP) we can consider
rendering our portlets in other technologies. One of our colleagues (at
one point) agreed to prototyping a Flash presentation layer.
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003
External Collaborations
Working to support GridSphere for the general Grid portal community
Collaborations with folks from Canadian National research Council
(NRC) to develop grid data transfer portlets using GridFTP
Collaborations with SZTAKI research center in Budapest to use
GridSphere to support users of SuperGrid and ClusterGrid projects
Collaboration with physicists at Albert-Einstein-institute in Berlin to
develop portlets for studying numerical relativity.
Submittted proposal to support development of ENZO-Grid Portal.
Collaborating with the Global Grid Forum (GGF) on enhancing the
usefulness and awareness of portlets in the Grid Computing
Environments WG.
Interested in promoting GridSphere and Portlets to more communities!
Please e-mail us if interested!
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003
Conclusion
GridSphere is one of many implementations of the
Portlet JSR. The point is Portlets is the standard for
the future of Web development. But this standard and
how it is being used is still evolving! We hope to
play an active role here!
Portlets are just the beginning… there are many other
aspects to portal development that we are exploring
and are just now starting to apply to real application
scenarios.
More information can be found on our GridLab web
pages at http://www.gridlab.org/WorkPackages/wp-4
Visit our project website at http://www.gridsphere.org!
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003
Some References
GridSphere Project
http://www.gridsphere.org
GridLab Project
http://www.gridlab.org
Astrophysics Simulation Collaboratory
http://www.ascportal.org
Grid Portal Development Toolkit:
http://www.doesciencegrid.org/Projects/GPDK
Portlet Specification:
http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168
Jakarta JetSpeed:
http://jakarta.apache.org/jetspeed
Cactus Project:
http://www.cactuscode.org
Globus Project:
http://ww.globus.org
Jakarta JetSpeed Portlet Tutorial:
http://www.bluesunrise.com/jetspeed-docs/JetspeedTutorial.htm
WebSphere Portal API:
http://www7b.software.ibm.com/wsdd/zones/portal/portlet/4.2api/
Portals & Portlets 2003, 14 July 2003